Se Hace Camino Al Andar

I came up with a neat little assignment for my students, to demonstrate understanding of the Prologue to Act 2 of Romeo and Juliet. You can see it at my wiki.

Even if it’s the first day back after a vacation, take the day off if you’re sick because inevitably, you will end up taking it out on your kids.

As frustrated as I am with my ability to control my class, and as often I think about leaving for a “regular” job, I am determined to stick this out and make it work. Every day, I see what I could be doing better or differently. One class, in particular, is driving me insane. I’ve already re-arranged their seats once since the beginning of the year…I need to do it again. I’d like to change the lay-out of the room but I share it with another teacher who is in there more periods than I am. He’s usually pretty agreeable when I want to change stuff around in the room but I don’t want inconvenience him. My other problem with this class, is that we’ve started the memoir unit and they haven’t hooked into any of the memoirs/excerpts we’ve read. The Ramp-Up curriculum calls for reading Living Up the Street by Gary Soto, and based on my experience using it last year, it’s not popular with the kids, so I didn’t planning on reading the whole thing with them…just a couple of stories. They didn’t like it. Then, on Monday, we read a chapter from Down These Mean Streets by Piri Thomas, which usually goes over well. Better, but still a big group of kids not getting into it. I’m completely convinced it’s because of the seating arrangement; there’s a core of kids who should not be sitting together and they spend so much time fooling around with each other, that they don’t give themselves a chance to get into it. I’ll try again tomorrow, with a new seating arrangement and see where it goes from there.

I’ve organized a poetry reading for The Teacher’s Voice at The Bowery Poetry Club, on Friday, December 9th…Teacher’s Happy Hour! Rather, it’s happy hour and a half, since its from 5:30-6pm. I have a flyer, if you’d like to run some off on the riso at work (shh!) and help me get people in the door. The deal is 5 bucks at the door, 2-for-1 drinks at the bar. We’ll have a great line-up of readers from the current issue, including Hal Sirowitz. See you there!

The Education Wonks: The Carnival Of Education: Week 42 – Thoughts And Ideas Freely Exchanged

Ms. Frizzle: If I were the dean…
The only thing I would add to Frizz’s list is that student should student-teach for more than a semester. Even more than two. It would be nice to see a program that puts students into classrooms from day one. I learned more in my one-semester student teaching experience than I did in all four years on campus, and that wasn’t even enough!

I’ve started my own wiki for posting my classroom lessons.
See it here.

I attended two workshops yesterday, one of which was a double session. I could have attended a lot more but life got in the way! In any case, the two I did attend were well worth the cost of the convention. One was on responding to student writing, and the other on teaching grammar in the context of reading and writing. I need to synthesize my information a little bit but let’s just say that I walked away from both workshops feeling like I had tools I could use in my classroom, now and in the near future.